Free Website Heat Map

Last week at Pubcon, I had the honor of sharing a “mini-keynote” session with landing page guru Tim Ash of SiteTuners. Tim mentioned an interesting heat map simulation tool from his company, AttentionWizard.

AttentionWizard is designed to simulate eye tracking heat maps at vastly lower expense. According to Tim, the heat maps produced by the tool match real eye tracking tests at better than 70%. The tool itself is based on an algorithm that looks at known eye-attracting factors (e.g., edges, colors) and the way people’s eyes typically scan a page.
For the heck of it, I ran a test on the Neuromarketing home page. The result, shown above, looks a little choppy – do people really scan all those little words? Nevertheless, that could be an indicator of distracting content, particularly if you are analyzing a landing page. (For non-Web marketers, a “landing page” is a page to which traffic is directed, usually from paid search ads, in order to convert the new visitor into a registration or a sale.) A key element of landing pages is a minimum number of distracting graphics, links that take the visitor off that page, etc., since elements like those get in the way of conversion.

“Eye-tracking is particularly useful in detecting problems in the earlier stages of the decision process (awareness and interest). If most test subjects do not look at the desired part of the page, they are not even aware that the conversion action is possible. In effect, for similar visitors to your site the conversion action does not exist.”

While in that context Tim is referring to real eye-tracking tests, similar logic would apply to simulations that are reasonably representative of the real thing.

Free Heat Map

Although AttentionWizard is a paid service, it allows one free heat map to be generated per day. The paid versions produce higher resolution images, faster results, and have either a small watermark or no watermark at all.

Give the tool a try and let me know if it matches up with your experience. In particular, if you have tried multiple page versions it would be interesting to see if this simulated heat map predicts issues correctly. Feel free to post a comment with your experience or opinion!

Another attention analysis vendor is http://www.feng-gui.com/
Feng-GUI service uses software to analyze the images you upload and provide image owners with heat maps and attention analysis information.
This testing tool is used by designers and web developers and to optimize the design and increase conversion rates.

thanks Roger for writing about Feng-GUI.
since 2008 (your previous post date) there has been a tremendous change in Feng-GUI analysis results and reports.
see http://www.feng-gui.com/faq.htm
you are welcome to contact Feng-GUI support and request for evaluation credentials to review the latest changes.

Tobias, since this is a simulation that doesn’t involve real eye measurements, I don’t think accuracy is a factor. It’s just an algorithm that looks for contrast, edges, images, etc. to roughly approximate real eye-tracking studies.

It generates Click Heatmaps and offers Click and Tap Playback! It works with Fluid layouts so it will playback a user session if they are on a Mobile device or desktop computer. If you have media queries that change the layout on the page, when a mobile device hits it, we have a feature where you can enable Dynamic Content on the page and then apply the Heatmap or Play user sessions to reveal hot points on the dynamic elements! Playback of sessions overlays an optional path with arrows (click 1,2,3 etc). There is even an instant playback speed. The Dashboard runs on your site and works on a Smart Phone or Desktop computer. At heatmap.ca there is a page of visual analytics including clicks by Country, State, City, Time of Day, Day of week, Tablets, Phones, etc.

This is not a limited tool…you get 500,000 clicks per month, Unlimited Views, you can monitor 100 pages per month across multiple domains.

On a personal note, I thought it was about time this type of service was available to all small to medium sized businesses as a free service. I am giving something back to the community. Enjoy!

Rob
I welcome your feedback and if you have any questions, let me know.